Old Rapier ship model

Discuss the Wing Commander Series and find the latest information on the Wing Commander Universe privateer mod as well as the standalone mod Wasteland Incident project.
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Orthuberra
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Old Rapier ship model

Post by Orthuberra »

I've been posting in the Privateer forum for those who haven't seen me, anyways, I guess this is the area for non privateer stuff. Well I had an old WW2 fighter model on my computer and decided to heavily modify it to the rapier in the wing commander movie, but I have never seen the movie and only had a photo to go on (I didn't even know they made a movie until recently). Anyways, attached is a picture, I don't know what else to do on it, so I'll give the model file to anyone who thinks they can finish it up. I guess anyone who wants to do the WC zero or Privateer zero may find of benefit. I didn't find an old rapier in the

P.S. It's 4 in the morning here and I just made the model apologies if its a mess, not to scale etc. :wink:
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Post by targ collective »

That's a good effort. However, there is only one area in the forums for off-topic stuff, the Off-Topic forum.

It was never really felt necessary to have a Privateer-specific Off-Topic forum.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Why, Targ? The Rapier is a WC ship, pretty much on topic, particularly in the context that WC0 will be using the movie rapier. The "bad news" is we got a model already...
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/forum ... 9419#79419
Just needs to be UV-unwrapped and textured.
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Post by targ collective »

Oh, is it? Sorry, I thought he was talking about a WW2 fighter. Never mind then, it is on topic after all...
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Well, he did mention modifying an actual fighter; but in fact that's what they did to make the movie rapier for the movie :D
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Post by Orthuberra »

Wow that Rapier model is awesome, couldn't even tell what the wings looked like in the pic I saw, I like the weird rectangle shape to them, looks like some retro steampunk stuff :). Any chance I can find a download for it?
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Here you go:
http://deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships/MRa ... er07.blend
It's not quite finished yet; I found some reference pics *after* I modelled it that throw light into the real shape of the wings, and some other details; and then it needs to be UV unwrapped for texturing. Have you done UV unwraps before? If you're up to it, we got some fairly new unwrapping standards that make texturing easier, like having the front-to-back direction map to a left-to-right direction in the UV map. Check the how-to's page...
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/HowTos
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Post by Orthuberra »

Hi Chuck, its late and I'm going to bed, but I got your file, thanks, I did a quick top and bottom seam (no landing gear/missile group yet) and loaded a blown up gaea base scene just to see what I'm working with. Unfortunately, memorial day weekend is coming up & work and stuff means it will be at least a few days before I get back to this. But if the shape doesn't change that much then I suppose I could make a texture soon and just edit parts of it later when the final model is finished and can do a new UV wrap.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Okay, thanks! I'll try and quickly finish it up. Be sure to read the unwrapping and texturing tutorials in the meantime.
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/HowTos
WCU has a database of hundreds of ship meshes, and more ships in-game than any other fan project; but most of the models are medicre quality, and most of the texture jobs are poor quality. We want to change that, going forward. Here's an example of the type of texturing quality we're going for now:

Image

Image

That is, really close to the original when viewed from a distance, but highly realistic at close range:

Image

Of course, the movie rapier needs a different kind of texturing, rich in rust, to resemble the original movie model...
http://vegastrike.sourceforge.net/wiki/ ... :RapierMK1
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Post by Dilloh »

That is simply truly really fXXXing awesome, chuck!!!
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Thanks. This new Demon's been sitting there for months. You want to throw it in-game? I just need to make a bfxm; that's all. (Well, it would be nice to add an LOD, but we can do that later).
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Post by Dilloh »

That really would be nice, but there's no need to delay other things for it, chuck.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

I'm going to hit the bed, right now, but as soon as I get up I'll do the bxfm; it should take a couple of hours. BTW, it's gonna look a bit duller in-game; --I have normal mapping, shadows, and shininess mapping in those renders, which the engine doesn't support yet.
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Post by Dilloh »

Now seeing your Drayman thread, I'd say I can wait - I have a feeling you'll redo more PR ships.

I'd like to grab all of them for PU :twisted:
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Took hours and hours to get the darn thing converted to bfxm. First the problems of Blender export scripts; gazillions of inscrutable options. Then I was struggling for hours with the problem that I seemed to have no specularity at all. I finally figured it out: There's no sky background in Troy, for some damned reason, so there was nothing to reflect. Then I'm trying to get to land in some base in a system other than Troy and save the game, so I can test the specular texture, but I get attacked and destroyed each time. And this is at the "Easier" level. I finally made it after I found Afterburner for sale in Troy... Why isn't it always for sale?

So now it works, but it looks like crap in-game. I mean, I expected crap, but not so much... The OpenGL standard pixel pipeline is total, absolute garbage. Without shaders nothing's ever going to look good, I'm afraid. That's what I should be doing first, I think; getting some basic shaders to work: Plain bump mapping, plain phong shading with fresnel; and, for the sake of environment mapping, we should just blur the heck out the backgrounds; they look ridiculous reflecting with so much sharpness.

Anyways, here's the file:
http://deeplayer.com/dan_w/WCUships/Demon/demon.7z


Image

Image

You'll need to adjust the scaling in units.csv, though. I think the engine exhaust plumes are somewhere inside the ship.
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Post by DualJoe »

A quickfix would be to bake the shading details in the diffuse and spec either with Blender or the Gimp.

Looked decent enough for my Hornet, although it won't compare to the future shader implementation.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

No, you'd have to see it in-game to understand what I'm talking about. I think part of it is the the environment setup. The stars should really be light-sources at infinity, without atennuation, and with a value of 1.0 white light. Or 0.9 so as to reserve some light range margin for environment mapping and baked ambient. But the way the engine works is the light is really where the star is, distances vary, so you can end up getting too much light or not enough. In Privateer we don't have enough starlight no matter where we go. So the ship looks dark in diffuse, and worse, it shows none of the beautiful phong shading highlights we should be seeing --even with just OpenGL.

And then the environment mapping is done without filtering and at full env cube map resolution, which makes any ship looks like it's wrapped in glossy, see-through latex. Even if the specular color is dark, and you can barely see the reflections, whatever you can see of specular reflections looks like reflections off some glossy plastic vacuum-wrapped on the ship, anyhow; because the reflections are too detailed and too sharp (and pixelated, at that). Absolutely awful!
But the easiest way to solve this latter problem would be to filter the background off-line, in Gimp. Just blur the heck out of them. And I mean the heck out of them, like four passes of gaussian of radius of 200 or something. What complicates the matter is that to blur a cube box you need to arrange one of the six sides at a time with another 4 of them around it, blur the whole thing, then separate them. Nightmare. Unless I write code to do it...
But then we'd have to mod the engine's code to use the blurred cube map for enviro mapping, while using the non-blurred version as background.
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Post by Dilloh »

The Demon looks good, maybe not as good as in the pictures you posted in advance, but it still is a better texture then the stock PR had.

Afterburners are hard to get in Troy at the beginning - best place is Helen.
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Post by charlieg »

Bump mapping and phong shading have been around for over a decade. Why does it need doing with shaders which are only effective on very modern graphics cards? There must be other reasons for stuff to look not-very-good because 3D graphics is not a new thing and being dependent on all these latest techniques seems somewhat strange to me.
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Post by chuck_starchaser »

Very true, Charlieg. WRT to phong shading, I think it IS there, but just barely visible, due to the lack of light. I had this argument once with Klauss; I was telling him, no matter how far or close the star is, it should be modellled as a "light source at infinity", with no decay, and control its direction from software. I don't know what was so hard to understand, but Klauss was adamant it should be a point source. With a light at infinity, we don't have to deal with decay, and we could easily equalize the light level everywhere. May sound unnatural, and it is; but light levels we can function in RL span about 7 orders of magnitude; but a monitor can hardly span 1 order of magnitude while keeping any color fidelity; so might as well just equalize light levels universally, rather than not --and then have to do all kinds of HDR trickery to equalize them anyways... (as Klauss was planning).

Bump-mapping, frankly I don't know how one did it prior to shaders; I think it was through extensions. The good thing about doing it with shaders is that you can gradually improve the shaders afterwards, like adding paralax.

And detecting wither the videocard supports shaders version such and so is easy, whereas inquiring about supported extensions, once I downloaded code to do that, many years ago, and it was like pages and pages of code.

Finally, myself, I never got through with my old attempt at detecting and managing extensions and stuff; but shader code I've done before, successfully. I'm personally much more scared of the aspect of digging into VS code to plug the shaders in, than I am of writing the shaders themselves.
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Post by charlieg »

I agree when it comes to the stars. Given the scale / distance it makes no sense for distant stars to be modelled as point light sources. It seems like a very obvious optimization.

I assume you are you talking about just local stars?
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